


it's (supposed to be) a wonderful life

by iceberry



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Season/Series 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28320474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iceberry/pseuds/iceberry
Summary: “strange, isn’t it? each man’s life touches so many other lives. and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”dean mourns, sam tries to make sense of his absence in apocalypse world. set early s13.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	it's (supposed to be) a wonderful life

**Author's Note:**

> quote in summary is, of course, from clarence in it's a wonderful life

There’s two days and one night of silence between them, sandwiches on stale bread made on their own and taken to their own rooms to eat in a place where they don’t have to look in each other’s eyes. (Sam makes extras, leaves them on plates outside Jack’s door). It can’t—and doesn’t—last forever, not right now and not in the bunker. They both end up in the library eventually, each nursing a glass of scotch left over from the bottle Crowley had appeared with, a strange lingering reminder of the demon. Another footnote on the laundry list of people they've lost. 

There's still a mess to clean up in here—they’d gotten rid of Ketch and Bevell’s bodies and scrubbed the blood out of the hardwood best they could before they found Cas and Kelly, dragged a spare table up from storage to replace the broken one. But there’s still books to re-shelve, jars of spell components to put away, and a bowl of herbs and coagulated blood to throw out. They’ve been busy.

Sam’s the first to break, to finally hit a point where he decides he can’t deal with the quiet anymore. It’s really more specific than that—he can’t deal with the silence, but _especially_ not the pointed silence when it comes to Jack. Dean's made it clear that he won't have that conversation again, for a few days at least, and Sam's too tired to press the matter tonight, but the thought is there, in every consideration he gives to opening his mouth and saying something. Dean pushing things down by avoiding conversation at all costs is nothing new, but it feels like with each minute that passes their opinions on what to do with the nephilim are diverging further and further apart. And it’s not an abstract, philosophical discussion: Jack is here, in the bunker, with them.

But even sans Jack as a topic, someone has to break the silence they've been holding tight the past few days. It isn't going to be Dean. Might as well be Sam.

"I keep thinking about the other world. Having dreams about it." Sam breaks the quiet, and takes a sip of his whiskey to avoid meeting Dean's gaze, because he realizes after the words leave his mouth that this probably isn’t a conversation Dean isn’t ready to have either. _What else is there?_ he thinks.

"Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten," Dean's voice is brittle, dry, sharp. It’s full of loss, and angry in a way Sam hasn't heard since they stood in front of Charlie’s pyre, and he can’t help but wince. Sam knows Dean’s not sleeping, suspects that on the rare occasions he passes out for a few hours he’s waking up with the images of their mom falling through the rift and Cas’s body seared on the inside of his eyelids. Half of it is intuition from years of being around his brother, the other half is because Sam is having the same nightmares.

"Not - not like that," Sam says softly, course-correcting best he can. He wants to talk, doesn’t want to upset Dean, wants to loosen the vice of silence that’s been crushing his chest the last few days in the bunker. "Just about how… he said it ended up like that because we were never born?"

"You believe that’s it? That’s the only reason?"

"That’s what Cas said that… _other_ Bobby told him. And yeah, I believe Cas." Sam taps the bottom edge of his glass on the table lightly as he waits for a response, hoping Cas’ name isn’t going to light the powder keg. “Do you have another theory?”

“I don’t have one,” Dean says, and he doesn’t look over or even raise his eyes from his glass. “And honestly? It doesn’t _fucking_ matter to me right now, because everyone we love in _this_ world is dead because of us, Sam. I care a whole lot more about that.”

Sam sighs.

◎

"I'm going for a run," Sam says, looking up from the bottom of the library steps, and isn’t surprised when Dean just pours himself another scotch without a glance and doesn't question why he's going for a run at 10 PM. 

Sam knows Dean, knows him like the back of his hand and the inside of his eyelids, for better and for worse. And so he can’t be _surprised_ by how his brother is grieving, not really. 

Sam is grieving too. The permanence of Cas’s absence is like the loss of a limb; he even feels a twang of regrettable sentimentality when he remembers that Crowley is gone for good. His mom... _Winchesters have gotten out of worse_ , he reminds himself, and tries to leave those thoughts there, because: Sam knows that he’s needed here. Dean needs him. Jack needs him. Cas needs him to be there for Jack.

(There's a part of him that wants to say that he doesn't trust the son of Lucifer, that his responsibility to Jack is purely practicality and promises to a dead friend. There’s another part of him that knows that’s a lie, that he sees way too much of himself in the nephilim for that to be convincing.)

He tightens his running shoes and heads out.

There’s a few routes Sam takes regularly when he runs. Sometimes he’ll follow the road and skim past the edge of Lebanon proper, nodding at the waves he gets from the few people who recognize him as one of the “Campbell brothers” and do a quick loop in the park for good measure. Other times he’ll run down the drive past the bunker and keep going, to where the road is dirt and all that’s around him are green-yellow fields. Tonight he heads towards town, picking up the pace while the surface is flat and slowing down as he takes a soft right into the woods. He slows his pace to a careful jog in the dark, now that the moonlight he'd been seeing by is dimmed by treecover. 

The images of the other world that repeat themselves in his dreams come to mind as he heads up the path. The air is heavy, the humidity lingering from earlier rain making his hair stick to his forehead; he can’t pull his thoughts away from how acrid and dry the air of the other world was. It's not long before trees surround him; though it’s hard to see them in the dark, he can _feel_ them rising above him. He thinks of the strange blade-like obelisks emerging from the desiccated earth. Everywhere around him are echoes of the other world, reverberations that mostly serve to remind him how _different_ it is than his home. 

Sam follows the path as it begins to loop back towards the hill the bunker is built into, grateful for four years of building up familiarity with these trails as he navigates through the dark. The hill crests about 200 yards away from the bunker’s towering exterior, and he pauses at the top, partially to catch his breath, and partially to look out at the glimpses of life he can see through the trees. Every so often, he’ll catch sight of the headlights of a car passing by the turn towards the bunker, certainly driven by someone blissfully unaware . He can’t see any lights from Lebanon proper from up here, but there’s a farmhouse a mile to the West whose porch lights he thinks he can see flickers of through the gaps in foliage.

He doesn’t know how the rift works, isn’t sure if where they stepped into that other world was the same Pacific Northwest valley they had followed Cas to; the gray of their surroundings had been so.... geographically untethered, so unlike any place Sam has been to or read of in this world. But if it is, he tries to mentally map out how the lakebed would have disappeared and the grey hills that surrounded them would have risen up, how much magical violence it would have taken to shape the earth into the place they’d scene.

He pauses when he reaches the door back into the bunker, looks back out into the dark and catches his breath. Even at night, there's so _much_ , so much that he’s just grown used to forgetting. There's crickets, chirping at a fever pitch, then lapsing into quiet before starting. Patches of clouds cover the sky, backlit by anemic light from the moon. _They still had stars, right?_ Sam wonders to himself, keeping his eyes trained on the pinpricks of light above him as he fumbles with the zipper of his jacket pocket, then freezes, drops his hand back to his side and looks around.

On paper, in theory, Sam knows they've saved the world. More than once, even. But trying to truly _comprehend_ that, trying to square that their world is the opposite of the desolation of the other one _because_ of them - it's staggering. The importance of the work they do is easy to understand when it’s a single person they pull out of a monster’s grasp, driving away knowing there’s tangible proof that _something_ good has come out of all the mistakes they’ve made along the way. When it’s the remnants of a war staring him in the face, it’s just… overwhelming. 

_Maybe it would be easier to understand if we had seen the smaller things,_ Sam thinks, things Sam _can_ imagine if he tries. The Bunker, still empty and dusty years after the Men of Letters were torn apart. The Impala, sitting half-assembled in a junkyard, maybe in Lawrence, or maybe somewhere else. Maybe it doesn’t even exist anymore, scrap metal torn up in an angelic battle or destroyed by desperate humans. Did Jo and Ellen survive the apocalypse? Did _Jess_? Maybe the smaller things aren’t going to help him make sense of it any better, he realizes, because going through every person whose life intersected with his is even harder, even more upsetting somehow. It makes his absence in the other world feel less like happenstance, more like personal failure; he knows that he’s fucked up plenty with people in this world, that his decisions have hurt people time and time again but it’s _different_ than the world ending and them not having a chance at all.

He raises his hand again, first to wipe his damp hair out of his eyes, and then to pull the key out of his pocket and unlock the door. The more time he spends thinking about it, the more the implications threaten to sweep him away from the here and now, and that’s not an option. So he’ll push it down for the time being. Maybe when they get their mom back, maybe when things stop feeling like they’re a hair’s breadth away from splintering between him and Dean, maybe—maybe then Sam will be able to understand it.

(But he’s not holding his breath.)

**Author's Note:**

> this isn't strictly speaking, a christmas story (though i did write one of those! go read it! it's much better than this!), but because it was directly inspired by my realization that apocalypse world is just it's a wonderful life taken to its most extreme point, and it never feels like the boys have the george bailey realization that they do matter! not that i think sam has that realization at the end of this fic lol
> 
> anyways! merry christmas if you celebrate, comments would be a GREAT gift to me if you feel so inclined! find me at @tube_ebooks on twitter, where i have mostly been tweeting about a very supernatural christmas


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